Michael Foucault about words and things

Abstract

It seems that one of the functions Science performs permanently in human culture consists in unifying practical skills and cosmological beliefs, the episteme and the techne. What seems of specific interest are the historically variable interactions and dependencies between these two roles of science. In Les Mots et les Choses Michael Foucault characterizes the development of modern episteme by two great discontinuities: the first inaugurates the so-called Scientific Revolution and the second, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, marks the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and of the modern age. When we talk about science today, we mostly think of the modern science that has emerged since Galileo and Newton. But Galileo’s name is mentioned, but once in Foucault’s whole book, and his achievements are put as of little importance. And Newton, the greatest scientist of the Classical Age, remains equally absent. So how are we supposed to understand Foucault’s argument? Foucault’s book is not a history of science or of knowledge but deals with the rules of knowledge formation and representation. Therefore, Condillac seems more important than Galileo or Descartes and Novalis and Nietzsche more than Hegel and Marx or Sartre. Because all thinking occurs in terms of signs, and all knowledge must be represented, we are led to taking a semiotic perspective. This approach is justified as Foucault himself describes the door to the Classical age as being characterized by a transformation of the sign from a means of knowledge to an element of representation as such.